by Kolapo Olapoju
The All Progressives Congress (APC) has advised Nigerians to vote out President Goodluck Jonathan at the presidential election on February 14, because he lacks the capacity to solve the problems bedeviling the nation.
The party issued a statement through its National Publicity Secretary, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, in Lagos on Friday, January 2, stating that the country cannot afford to give President Jonathan a few more years to tackle the challenges facing the country, as he has not done much in the last 6 years.
The statement said: “The President has finally admitted that the two main challenges facing the country are corruption and insecurity, and seems to be telling Nigerians to give him more time to tackle the problems. But the truth is that he lacks the capacity to fight and defeat these challenges, whether in six or 10 years.”
“A President who has spent the last six years trying to diagnose the main problems facing the country will apparently need another four years to plan how to tackle the challenges. By then, all of us would have been buried under the rubble of corruption and our country would have been decimated by insecurity.”
“It is therefore time for Nigerians to vote in a President who will hit the ground running, a President who will tackle the problems of corruption and insecurity headlong, without giving excuses for failure.”
The major opposition party also accused Jonathan of condoning corruption and castrating the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC).
The party said: “Mr. President said he wants to put in place the institutions to tackle corruption before taking on the canker worm that has almost destroyed the fabric of our society. Pray, whatever happened to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC)? Were they not institutions specifically created for the purpose of tackling corruption, but which the Jonathan Administration chose to castrate?”
“There is no better way to say this: President Jonathan lacks the political will to tackle corruption, and he will not tackle it if he spends 60 years in office.”
Furthermore, the party said the President missed a golden opportunity to engage and defeat the Boko Haram insurgency in its early stages. It said that instead of tackling the menace of insurgency from the inception, he was blaming everyone but his Administration for the problem.
“Had the President learnt a lesson or two from the crushing defeat of the Maitatsine sect by Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, which signalled the death knell of the sect that is a precursor of Boko Haram, the insurgency that is daily claiming the lives of our citizens would have been defeated early on.
“It is too late in the day for President Jonathan to engage in sophistry over the twin evil of corruption and insecurity. He has reached the limit of his capacity to tackle these challenges and it is time to allow those with necessary political will and capacity to take on the challenges before they crush the country.”
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